Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

openstreetmap.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 215 posts

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#161

Post by JdeBP »

dmortin wrote: post #22

" but also made it mandatory to give your credit card number even if you do not go over the free limit !" Only if you are a new user. Google published a transition document for existing users and it says they don't have to add a card, but then of course your maps stop working for the rest of the month if you go over the $200 free quota. So current users have it easier, but new users have to add a card.

One must supply a credit card or have an account with billing enabled. Existing users will have accounts. But they must be altered to have billing enabled if they do not have it enabled already.

* https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#162

Post by leokennis »

yosito wrote: post #8

Open Street Maps is great as a data source, but the front end client apps for using it are somewhat lacking. On my iPhone, I use Maps.me when I travel to Cuba and Google Maps almost everywhere else. If I was building an app, I'd definitely use OSM and probably Mapbox.

For “off road” use, Gaia GPS is great. Especially since it syncs to their website.

I love OSM but editing is horrible. Draw a small path that wasn’t there before, pick from 500 different labels and tags (landuse:path or landuse:track?), make one small mistake, get a passive aggressive reply from an experienced editor that is basically “get off my lawn” and have your edit reversed...

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#163

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

kyrra wrote: post #127
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes a couple of days to set it up but the results are amazing. We also have setup the Geo coding and reverse Geo coding with nominatim. A million requests per day costs us peanuts as opposed to Google , which anyway suspended us due to international credit card verification issues. On a related note, Firefox on Linux came with duckduckgo as default and I am so impressed with it's search results. Unfortunately their…

I'd be interested in hearing what issues you've had with adding a card on Google's platform. There is a chance you could diagnose it yourself by trying to add it, then contacting your bank and asking why the authorization was declined.

I dont think I should be chasing up my bank on why authorization failed. I have zero interest in using google maps for my production environment

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#164

Post by kalleboo »

dominotw wrote: post #63
DanBC wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call Germany? Germany, or Deutschland? Why is the one you use more correct than the other?

Germany is more correct because they write " made in Germany" on German products.

So since the Japanese write 日本製 on their products you agree all maps should write it 日本 then?

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#165

Post by ianleighton »

Freak_NL wrote: post #151
lucb1e wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply wouldn't be able to remember or refer to Russia if it was always called Русский, but I do agree that we shouldn't translate as much as we do. Be it names in translated books, cities, countries, software... For example, the number of translations for a small city in Belgium called Liège/Lüttich/Luik is just confusing, and it's not even a popular tourist destination (everyone drives through it on their way sou…

It's a fair-sized city (population of 200000) in the French-speaking part of Belgium near the Dutch-speaking part, with historical ties to the German language. Of course it is known in all three languages. And as with all cities of some importance on OpenStreetMap, its entry includes the names it is known by in a variety of languages. These aren't shown by default, but they can be used to search for in ones native la…

...granted my partner (who comes from near Liège and studied there) also doesn’t like it because it is pretty grey, but so is most of Belgium. I find the mix of old and postwar architecture quite beautiful and there is lots of cool stuff going on now; it’s like an edgier, more “Brooklyn” alternative to Maastricht.

What I find interesting is that the road signs in the Netherlands say Liège whereas in the few km of Vlaanderen on the way there, they insist on Luik. But this is what makes Belgium, Belgium.

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#166

Post by jaakl »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #159
crazygringo wrote: post #111

I totally support OSM 1000%... But frankly, it seems it's still a lot of work to build OSM into your own website/app, setting up your own tile server. I know there are instructions for this [1] [2] -- but to really get popular, it seems like there really ought to be up-to-date, auto-updating, officially recommended and totally secure server images on Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure where anyone can spin it…

> I assume I'd be using at least a day to set things up You assume wrong. :) It takes an hour or so to get a tileserver up and running with the switch2osm instructions. I've done it countless times. (You do then need to wait for the Postgres database to populate, but that's just fire-and-forget.) They're written for Ubuntu LTS versions so the "newer versions" issue doesn't arise. Or if Docker's your bag, you can get…

A worldwide tile server for low load (up to <30 tps) decent latency (<100ms per tile) can be set up with 2core, 4GB ram and 70GB HDD machine. Key is to use “prerendered” vector tile stack. Geocoding is way harder task. The old sites like switch2osm tend to have old and slow imposm/Postgres stacks.

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#167

Post by SyneRyder »

kyrra wrote: post #127
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes a couple of days to set it up but the results are amazing. We also have setup the Geo coding and reverse Geo coding with nominatim. A million requests per day costs us peanuts as opposed to Google , which anyway suspended us due to international credit card verification issues. On a related note, Firefox on Linux came with duckduckgo as default and I am so impressed with it's search results. Unfortunately their…

I'd be interested in hearing what issues you've had with adding a card on Google's platform. There is a chance you could diagnose it yourself by trying to add it, then contacting your bank and asking why the authorization was declined.

I'm upvoting this one as Kyrra works at Google on payments, according to Kyrra's profile. (That wasn't immediately clear to me from the comment.)

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#168

Post by lorenzhs »

puzzle wrote: post #88
criley2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google makes it trivial to download maps for offline use, I have multiple states downloaded in Maps. Google Maps experience with offline downloaded maps is 100% quality and absolutely not "sub-par" or "frustrating".

At some point, there was also this undocumented feature where it fetches not just the directions, but a little extra data so it can reroute you on the device if you miss a turn and your phone has gone offline. It only works for small detours, does not take traffic into account, etc.

There's a paper on how this works from Microsoft Research and KIT (where all of the commonly used routing techniques were developed!): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#169

Post by Fnoord »

1996 wrote: post #13

And if you can't use OSM, try Here maps. They are easy to download for offline use. Following the suggestion of friends, I have repurposed an old phone as a "travel phone" with maps of the whole world (or at least the parts I can download!) Not perfect, but when I catch a plane, I don't have to worry about local networks. Fun story: recently in Europe, Google Maps stuttered. Now and then, there was a networking issue…

Google Maps is also easy to download for offline use, you just have to plan ahead. If you're residing in EU, your data plan is valid everywhere within the EU. Here Maps or HereWeGo or whatever it is called is full with tracking software [1], just like Google Maps (actually more trackers than Google Maps [2] and Google Maps Go [3]; with Google apps you know it is just Google who tracks you plus whoever has authority over them (governments)). It is also proprietary, just like Google Maps. All of that in contrast to OSM.

[1] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/search/com.her...

[2] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/11485/

[3] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/7583/

Re: Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?

#170

Post by dmortin »

JdeBP wrote: post #161
dmortin wrote: post #22

" but also made it mandatory to give your credit card number even if you do not go over the free limit !" Only if you are a new user. Google published a transition document for existing users and it says they don't have to add a card, but then of course your maps stop working for the rest of the month if you go over the $200 free quota. So current users have it easier, but new users have to add a card.

One must supply a credit card or have an account with billing enabled. Existing users will have accounts. But they must be altered to have billing enabled if they do not have it enabled already. * https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/

There is a separate guide for existing users and it states:

"If you choose not to add a billing account, there is a risk that if your usage exceeds $200 in a given month, your Maps API implementation will be degraded or other API requests will return an error."

https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch...

So you can choose not to add a billing account if you are an existing user, but then maps won't work beyond the $200 credit/month.

Post reply on HN